Latest SGR 1627-41 Stories

XMM-Newton has caught the fading glow of a tiny celestial object, revealing its rotation rate for the first time. The new information confirms this particular object as one of an extremely rare class of stellar zombie "“ each one the dead heart of a star that refuses to die.There are just five so-called Soft Gamma-ray Repeaters (SGRs) known, four in the Milky Way and one in our satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Each is between 10 and 30 km across, yet contains about twice the...